Victory Lap
by DasCheesenborgir
Summary: It's been years since the mass emigrations from Lordran, the lucky few who had wandered its crags for millennia, preying upon the same game with calloused efficiency finally having all left for greater places... leaving those who were too damn lazy to get off their asses to begin with to fight one, final struggle for some goddamn potatoes.
1. Movie Knight in Anor Londo

**For the sake of all of us, don't even ask where the fuck this idea came from.**

**0-0-0**

Through the filtered glow of Gwyndolin's old Blue Eye projector, a pair of…

Ornstein squinted beneath his helm, having to blink a few times to make sure that he was seeing this right through the grainy shroud cast over the image.

"Are those… crows?"

"Shh!"

He fought the urge to grumble as Priscilla and Smough hissed back at him, as they always did whenever he chose to bring up a legitimate and logical question of course.

That thought suddenly reminded him of the warm and fuzzy bulk of snow white fur pressed against his armor on the left, and the rounded metal frame of Smough's armor squeezing him in on the right.

Gwynevere's former quarters didn't seem quite as spacious as it usually did with the addition of a fairly sizeable dragon halfbreed, he supposed.

He settled for just letting a tired sigh escape from the confines of his helm, the obnoxiously small gap at the front of said helm sending it whistling out in a grated and distorted whine.

_Serves me right for picking out a documentary, _he reflected bitterly as he watched the crow… things… snuggle and peck at each others' disturbingly human bodies in the snow.

And some documentary it was- there wasn't even any explanation for what was occurring on screen! Just a horribly compressed moving still of two creatures nuzzling their abominable beaks together, the only noise filling the darkened halls of Anor Londo their occasional, muted croaks.

At least those silly 'Pis Vis Pis' (with a silent 's' as Smough never ceased to remind him) flicks filled the void of silence with obnoxiously exaggerated and cartoonish scrapes of cheap tin on tin- this was just… agonizing.

He shifted around in his seat, or at least as much as he could, being sandwiched between an executioner and crossbreed.

"What is-"

"Shh!"

He craned his neck up to face his… 'companion', glaring back at the molded brass of a stoic, rounded face. If looks could kill, Smough would be scrambling for the flasks of that infernal 'Estus' the Undead cherished so.

_"Nothing's even happening," _Ornstein growled.

The giant man simply pointed a stubby armored finger at the mound of white fur perched next to Ornstein.

He turned his gaze to Priscilla, and found with no small amount of horror that she was staring rather intently at the filtered image projected onto the marble wall. Those unnatural emerald eyes twinkled with fascination as she let the bundle of frazzled red yarn in her pale hands slip carelessly out of her fingers.

Oh, of course. This was probably her first time ever watching a movie- of course she would be practically enthralled by it, no matter how painfully _boring _it was. Gods damn it all.

He leaned back against the sumptuous cushion of the… recently _vanished _Godmother's sofa, the firm and yet compressible velvet surface providing the briefest of reprieves from the boggling insanity of the situation he found himself in.

_Wait… where in Izalith did she get yarn from? _

Before he could follow up on that thought, a grating snicker scraped against his eardrums.

He instinctively whipped his head around to shoot Smough a reprimanding glare, but the executioner was gazing just as intently at the screen as Priscilla was. He could practically _feel _the childish grin beneath the man's mask as he innocently clasped his armored fingers together.

Suppressing a sigh, and seeing no other course of action than enduring an hour or two of watching two… crow creatures (ladies, perhaps? The slender form of their bodies did indeed look very unsettlingly feminine)…

_Oh… oh Gods. _

Only when he turned his gaze back to the screen did he hear the muted croaks turn into a gradual and continuous cacophony of soft moans, the two creatures on screen now rubbing the entire length of their pale, _naked _bodies together.

By Gwyn, this was worse than when he walked in on Artorias and Ciaran…

Another snicker broke the soft… noise, and he realized, as the image shook just so ever slightly, that it was actually coming from the film.

What the hell was this blasphemous piece of cinema? Such… obscenity, on unimaginable levels-

_'Dude… are those things looking at us?'_

_ 'What?'_

_ 'Dude, LOOK.'_

The camera panned around with a sickening lurch, settling on a mob of the crow creatures.

Only these ones weren't copulating; they were gazing directly at the camera with their beady black eyes.

And then, with a flurry of glistening feathers, one of them leaped at the screen.

_'Holy SHIT, Peeve, run! RUN!' _

The camera clattered unceremoniously to the snow, showing only a splash of dark red blood and the very recognizable gold trimmed blue cloth of what was undoubtedly an Astoran Knight's surcoat.

_'Ooohhhh man-!'_

A terrifying screech rang out over the ensuing chaos, and one of the crows landed in a bloody heap right in front of the camera, its eyes splayed open in horror as blood dripped out of its gaping maw.

He shifted (again, as much as he could) uncomfortably in his seat as Smough let out his characteristic chortle, the deeply unsettling noise echoing out from his helmet like the morbid hybrid of a child's laugh and madman's cackle.

The sounds of battle were short lived, quickly dying down with a final, resounding clash of steel on bone. A metal plated hand briefly covered up the screen, thankfully blotting out the gruesome sight of the dead crow…

_'Oh my god- get him off me- get him off me-'_

…only for said hand to slide away, revealing a sight no better than the last.

'_Yeah, I saved you!'_

Whoever the two people in the film were, they were laughing hysterically as one of the crow creatures gripped one of them between its spindly legs, its sharp beak pecking mercilessly at the mop of frazzled black hair of the flailing man.

Their laughter didn't stop, even as more of the creatures hopped down from rickety perches, landing in flourishes of fluttering black feathers and advancing menacingly on the camera.

_'No, you didn't!'_

_'Dude, there's like a hundred million birds coming down at me!'_

Spitting out a glob of congealing blood and casting aside a loose piece of flesh from his face, the flailing man fell to the snow with the crow still pecking at his face, yelling out incoherent sentences between bouts of hearty chuckles.

'_Rrrrip!' _

And on that note, the film cut out in a flurry of static, clearing up and depositing them back at the serene sight of a bonfire, warm orange tendrils of flames wrapping around the decayed iron of the sword protruding from the mound of ash in the snow.

Ornstein blinked, lips pursed in a tight flat line beneath the snarling visage of his helmet.

He slowly found himself receding from the paralyzing disbelief and back into the cramped confines of the sofa he sat on. He could swear that Priscilla was gripping his arm with enough force to snap it off if she yanked hard enough- when he looked down at her, he found a… highly dissatisfied frown creased on her face.

He soon found his mouth sliding into a similar position as he turned his attention to Smough, his voice dangerously low.

"Smough… where did you find this?"

"Doof's Arfifes."

"I know that," he growled, trying to ignore the… _crunches _that Smough spoke between. "I meant which area of the Archives did you get it from?"

"Oh come on, have you _seen _how small those staircases are!? _Make sure you look on the third floor Smough! Try not to break anything Smough! _Can't exactly do both, old buddy!"

A few crumbs of whatever he was shoving through the comically small hole in his helm landed in Ornstein's lap. With a morbid curiosity, he plucked one of them off of his polished gold greaves, sighing again at his own folly really.

Much as he hated to admit it, the executioner had a point. Served him right for sending a man-child out to browse for documentaries.

_How much harm could it do? _He'd wondered back then.

The bone fragment crumbled between his fingers as he pressed down a little harder than he meant to.

Wait… bone fragment?

"Smough, what are you eating now?"

"Dried fingers deep fried in homeward bone dust. Want some?"

Before he could even respond, Smough shoved a whole iron pot full of the repulsive things in front of him, gnarled strips of flesh frozen in convulsing agony.

He had to slap away Priscilla's hand as she reached out for a sampling.

"Don't eat that," he warned.

"Oh, come on Orni," she pouted, "all we ever get to eat is sauteed Mimic tongue."

"Yes, because Gwyn knows that's the only damned edible thing he ever cooks!"

"Hey! You wouldn't have known you appreciated the taste of Mimic tongues if I didn't convince you to try it in the first place!"

He bristled at the comment, now dismissing it with a scoff and trying to turn his attention back to the screen.

'Convince' perhaps gave a little too much credit to Smough. The only thing the executioner had 'convinced' him to do that time was take a chug of Estus, and that… well, that had led to great many other things, things that he supposed it was perhaps good that he didn't remember.

He subconsciously turned to gaze out the open doors of Gwynevere's chambers, able to pick out the drunken scrawls of his own calligraphy vandalizing the far archway, sitting smugly over a crude iron hoop that had been haphazardly nailed to the wall.

_Get Dunked. _

No wonder all the Undead were going Hollow, if they were downing gulps of _that _kind of crap at each moment.

"Mm. Not bad."

_Crunch. Crunch. Crunch._

Priscilla chewed on a handful of the dried fingers, face scrunched up thoughtfully-

'_Oooh my god-'_

'_Run, Peeve, run!'_

-and promptly sent a fresh rain of crumbs pattering onto his lap as she let out a stifled giggle, her laughter mingling with Smough's chortles and the cackles emanating from the film in an orchestra of infernal insanity.

Ornstein could only bow his head, reaching back behind him to pluck at the strands of his helmet plume as if the gesture would grant him some sort of comfort- a rather unhealthy habit he'd developed recently, really.

A few seconds of his fingers brushing through empty air passed by before he realized that he'd been robbed of even that petty comfort.

His gaze turned in horror to the ball of 'yarn' still sitting in Priscilla's lap, sprinkles of dried finger crumbs falling all over it and becoming tangled in the rich red fibres.

"Priscilla."

"F-yeahf?" She responded between mouthfuls of unorthodox snackfood, spitting out a cloud of bone fragments between her lips.

"What have you done to my helmet?"


	2. Call to Adventure

**Oh god. Please don't even ask how half of this shit even got onto the page.**

**Fuck, I'm tired right now. Wish I had some fuckin' potatoes too alright…**

**0-0-0**

"…I wish I could have a Chaos Ember sometimes you know. I bet it'd make for amazing grilled maneater legs."

Smough's reedy voice broke over the constant, filtered _tap, tap _of a hammer striking smoldering metal emanating from that damned projector.

It was enough to rouse Ornstein from the murky haze he'd somehow managed to drift off into, the man-child executioner's stubby metal-plated hands dragging him down from the blissful, detached plane of existence he had somehow managed to ascend to in the droning rhythm of filmed blacksmithing.

Though he landed back in the crumb-stained, frayed sofa that was probably buckling under the combined weight of three massive figures who'd been quite unceremoniously sitting on their asses watching shitty documentaries for the past _week-_

(well, maybe not all of them were documentaries. He vaguely recalled some poorly processed play that, despite having several entire scenes lost to dust and degradation (or had he just dozed off in those moments as well? (speaking of dozing off, it seemed like the hulking executioner was too busy hunched over the edge of the sofa, rifling through whatever morbid supply of snackfood he'd stashed in that seemingly bottomless box of his to notice… (how many different side thoughts were running through his head now? Surely there were only so many he could filter through at once before-

A piercing, melodic yawn very rudely leapt in and thrust its sharpened blade through that circular train of thought that had been bound to end in a disastrous crash of catastrophic proportions anyways, very neatly running across the thinly layered metals plating its sides and shearing through the hull almost effortlessly-

-wait, what in Izalith was a train anyways?

He rasped out a scratchy groan of his own, and when he finally felt the furry, weight of Priscilla ease off of his lap (how was it even possible for him to detect the mutated, abominable tufts of fur _through plates of armor that could shrug off stone-sundering blows _to begin with…?)

_FUCK!_

A sudden spike of petty, but oh so inflammatory pain raced through his left shoulder as he unconsciously had been trying to flex it about in the confines of his armor without bringing it into contact with Smough's giant metal ass. An effort that only drove his other arm into grazing against a layer of disturbingly soft fur on his other side instead (again, how was it even possible for a substance to be so incredibly… _fluffy _that it could be felt through armor? What kind of witchcraft was this!?)

_Choo choo!_

Oh, wonderful. Somehow he'd managed to forget not only what a train was, but that there was in fact one headed right for them, just in the middle of nowhere, the blazing blue light sitting at the forefront of its black iron (Black iron… that sounded… familiar, somehow? Although it seemed like something he shouldn't be privy to, some lost and forgotten knowledge that his narrow and focused mind was never meant to bear-)

_I SAID CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKER!_

With a sudden flare of blazing blue light, he realized that the train was now but metres away from him, the gears screeching within its complex, incomprehensible rust metal insides whining like a fat baby's voice amplified through enclosed metal, all of it backed up by the incessant, ceaseless (discharge! No, what… in the name of Gwyndolin's tits, where did that come from!? That sounded disgusting!)- _symphonic _wail that turned the rain of sparks left in the screeching machine's into softly billowing tufts of white fur-

With a great roar, The Lion's eyes actually flickered open, finding with no small amount of horror that the very last two visages he wanted to see at this moment were indeed sitting before him, with one of them extending a comically small spoon towards the equally small slit in his helm where his mouth would be, making silly noises the whole time…

"Come on Ornstein, open wide, here comes the corpse wagon!"

_Choo choo…_

"By the Gods, get that away from me," he snapped with a restrained and irritated grit that surprised himself considering what he'd just seen.

"I don't think Orni finds your choice of words particularly appetizing," sang Priscilla in that infuriatingly singsong tone of hers.

Which was of course, her _usual _tone. Like having a fucking whining, smartass child trying to taunt him…

He glared daggers (or spears… spears were much more to his liking, particularly at this moment) at the crossbreed's dazzlingly emerald eyes, her lips curled up in that damning smile of hers that he could never tell was meant to convey mockery or genuine, naïve joy or fascination at abso-fucking-lutely everything around her-

_-wait… did she just call me Orni again?_

He caught a glint of her razor-sharp teeth as her lip twitched just slightly further upwards.

Oh yes. She was definitely smirking now.

As though the assert his dominance over his sorry excuse for a den once more, he reared his head back, baring his great, muscled metal chest for all to gaze upon, for the grainy blue light of Gwyndolin's old Blue Eye projector to bathe in magnificence-

"Just stab me through the back already, somebody, _something…_" he groaned pathetically.

He remained in that stretching position for as long as his twiggy-ass ribcage would allow him to, to an observer looking even more pitiful as he had unwittingly locked himself in the upwards motion of a strong pelvic thrust, the dull metal plating of his legs holding his chainmailed crotch up into the dank air of the Godmother's former residence as though he were very unceremoniously piercing the darkened sky with a great, defiant 'fuck you' to her and all the other Gods that had seen fit to condemn him to such a fate…

-which was cut painfully short as he suddenly felt a dainty little finger _poking _in that exact region.

He could've sworn he even let out a horrified yelp as he slammed himself back down into the tattered, crumb-infested cushions of the couch.

"What's between a person's legs anyways? I always had wondered why you people go through so much trouble of covering up the rest of your forms with such thick metal and leave only a small smattering of this-"

Her finger prodded at _that _region of chainmail again, sending him instinctively lurching over to a now thankfully vacant spot on the sofa considering how its former, gigantic resident was trying very poorly to conceal his childish laughter beneath his helm.

"Damn it, will you stop that!?"

"I'm just curious…" pouted the demon-halfbreed-dragon… _thing. _

"Oh don't worry," interjected Smough, his voice sounding all the more ominous as he spoke between peals of disturbing, distorted chortling. "That's just to keep the meat beneath tender. It's _easily _the most succulent part of the body-"

_"Smough!"_

"I thought you said these were?" Queried Priscilla with such a disturbingly childlike ignorance as she gestured at her… chest.

Ornstein could only listen with a muted horror as Smough began to prattle on about the finer points of cannibal cuisine, his devil of a halfbreed 'student' listening intently the whole time.

"Yes, well you see, it's not quite as… versatile. You see, the reason why _this-_"

"Don't you _fucking dare!_"

Poke.

Ornstein's boot rocketed out and smacked Smough's grotesque… baby-face helm squarely with a resounding clang, sending the executioner falling onto the marble floor with a resounding _boom _that only seemed to be amplified in the peals of bass laughter erupting from his mouth.

Priscilla acted as the piano to Smough's tuba in the orchestra of his torment (what were those things? Probably more absurd devices he'd manage to conjure up in his insanity… oh if his proud Knights could see him now…)

…yes. Indeed. If only they could see him now.

He just sighed and sunk back into the couch, tucking in his arms and legs as though the two devils he'd found himself so… abruptly given charge of, by his own accord nonetheless, that were currently flailing about on the grease-marred floor were still by his side.

If his comrades had told him that the end of world would've come like this…

He couldn't help but chuckle ever so bitterly at the thought. Not even Gough would have been audacious enough to suggest such a thing.

And yet, here he was.

Despite himself, he found a grim smile working its way up the edges of his mouth beneath the flat mask presented by his helmet as he watched the halfbreed and executioner roll around like…

…_basketballs…_

Yeah, sure, whatever those things were.

Inconceivable.

Just as he found himself settling in to condemn himself to a half hour of watching some prospective jackasses go spelunking into the "Halls of the Great Bonerwheel" as the film's title card so aptly put it, he let his gaze wander out to the distant windows of the great hall outside, peering past pillars that had been demolished and reconstituted time and time again, past panes that had been shattered only to be fused back into place and over the vast, empty expanse of Anor Londo, eternally bathed in darkness, eternally damned to be abandoned by those that once inhabited it.

_Abandoned. _

The filtered wail of the film's opening tunes dimmed out to but a drowning, muted lull, the tormenting laughter of Smough and Priscilla becoming nothing but backbeats to the ever ongoing lament of a Dragonslayer turned couch potato.

_No, seriously now, what by Gwyn's beard is a potato!?_

Actually, if he recalled correctly that _was _once a great export of Oolacile, right next to their suspiciously succulent mushrooms…

…by the Gods, he would kill for a meal that didn't require him to spend 10 minutes thoroughly checking it over for bits of bones lodged in it…

_Hmm…_

_ …abandoned…_

"…I've always wondered what those things tasted like…" he murmured, just loudly enough to catch the attention of his two compatriots. If they could even be called that.

It was a curious thing, what could possibly stoke one's inner fire, the intoxicating, amazing, at times _searing _desire to act- for some it was prophecy, a vague and babbling legend that promised them a place in the world if they would but only get off their sodden ass and do something- for others, it was zeal, a furious, blind dedication to powers far beyond that they could but only hear whispers from…

At that moment, for Dragonslayer Ornstein, it was his sudden craving for some fuckin' potatoes.

"Smough," he called firmly, breaking the quizzical silence that hung in the dim room.

"Yeah?"

"How would you and Priscilla feel about… a vacation?"

**0-0-0**

**CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKER**


End file.
